Two weeks into a project, your Claude chat has slowed to a crawl - every keystroke lags, scrolling is painful, and the browser is eating memory. The conversation that used to feel sharp now feels like wading through mud.
This is a browser rendering problem as much as an AI one. Long chat histories force your browser to hold hundreds of rendered message blocks in memory simultaneously. The fact that Claude for Desktop and the browser both suffer while the mobile app stays fast is the tell - mobile clients lazy-load conversation history, showing only recent messages. Your desktop browser is trying to render the entire thing at once.
Simply asking Claude to "print the full context" and pasting it into a new chat doesn't work well. A raw transcript isn't context - it's noise. The new conversation doesn't know which decisions mattered, what you tried and rejected, or what constraints you're working within. You get a confused assistant drowning in irrelevant detail.
What Actually Works
The most reliable approach is a structured handoff document. Before starting a fresh chat, ask Claude something like: "Write a project brief that captures: the goal, key decisions we've made and why, what we've built so far, what's still open, and any constraints I should carry forward." That 500-word summary outperforms a 50,000-word transcript every time.
If you're on Claude Pro or a team plan, Projects solve this natively. Projects give Claude persistent memory across separate conversations - you can start a fresh chat any time without re-explaining the background. The project's shared context loads automatically. For anyone doing ongoing work in Claude, Projects are the cleaner answer to conversation sprawl.
For developers using Claude Code, a CLAUDE.md file in your project root serves the same purpose - it's a living document Claude reads at the start of every session, so you never re-explain the architecture.
One other pattern worth adopting early: treat long projects as phases, not one continuous thread. End each phase with a summary note, start the next phase fresh with that note as your opening message. You preserve what matters and shed what doesn't.